


Cape & Aether

by aurilly



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Asgard (Marvel), Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Dancing, F/M, Jane Foster Loves Science, Protective Bucky Barnes, Thor: The Dark World, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-09 14:08:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19477480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Bucky doesn't usually lose focus on missions. But he's never had a target like Jane Foster before.





	Cape & Aether

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kereia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kereia/gifts).



Amongst the rubble of Thirty-Ninth Street, Bucky spotted an old lady struggling to get her purse out from under the ruin of a Chitauri sky bike. Better her purse than her head, Bucky thought as he ran over to help.

"Thank you, young man," she said once he'd gotten it out and handed it to her. "What's your name?"

"Don't worry about it." He booked it before she could get a better look at him, the kind of look that could ID him later.

He probably shouldn't have done that, he thought, as he walked to the rendezvous point. But then again, maybe he'd always done it, had always been here, in Midtown as well as on an assassination tour across the Middle East and ad Eastern Europe. What with the alien invasion in New York and all, the news outlets had never gotten around to covering those deaths.

Steve was waiting for him a few blocks away, in the Brooks Brothers on Madison, rifling through grandpa khakis. 

"You don't need any more of those," Bucky said from behind him.

Steve turned around, dead serious, but with that little smile of gladness he gave every time he saw his not-dead best friend walk into a room.

"All good?" he asked. 

"Scepter's back," Bucky replied. He didn't need to tell Steve how difficult it had been to see them all again—Rumlow, Rollins, fucking _Pierce_. The way he'd had to clench his fists to keep from hurting them, hurting them very badly. _They're all dead now_ , he'd kept repeating to tamp down the dread he felt—that he might screw up, that they might see him, that Shuri's fix hadn't actually worked, that they might get _two_ of him to torture back into submission…

"I'm so sorry," Steve said. He'd always been able to read Bucky's mind. "I should have been the one to—"

"We both know _three_ of you in that building wouldn't have been good. Hell, the world can barely handle one. It's fine. It's done. What about you?"

"All good. She didn't ask me a lot of questions, aside from how Bruce and Strange are. Seemed to know what I'm fixing to do." 

"And what did she think?"

"Probably realized she couldn't talk me out of it, so didn't bother."

"Smart lady."

Steve tossed Bucky a shopping bag.

"What's this?"

"I passed by a costume store off Bleeker Street. Figured you might need this where you're headed."

Bucky peeked into the bag and saw a soft mass of blue velvet. "Thanks."

"You ready?" Steve asked.

Together they headed down the street to the abandoned storefront where they'd stashed their gear. As they walked, Bucky took a last, long look around him, at the destruction of the afternoon, which paled in comparison to all the impressive new construction of the eighty years preceding. So, this was what New York looked like these days, he thought, for the tenth time in the past couple of hours. Or, well, what it had looked like nine years ago. Bucky hadn't been here since he'd left, way back in 1943. He'd seen pictures, of course, and watched one or two of the movies that Shuri had queued up for him on a tablet, but there was something about being here, standing here…

It didn't feel like home. 

He'd hoped it would. New York was his last hope for a home, for that little calming sensation, just above the liver, that he'd used to feel every time he walked into his shitty two-room apartment in Brooklyn, that he'd felt every time a train ride had crossed from Westchester into the Bronx. Home. 

That feeling was gone, and hadn't reappeared anywhere he'd lived since. There was nowhere else to look for it. And in a second, his best friend would be gone, too.

They'd said their goodbyes before, in 2023, not wanting to compromise the mission or risk not getting to say them at all if anything went off-plan. They'd said everything they'd had to say, but Bucky's eyes still got a little wet as he hugged Steve one last time. He could feel moisture where Steve's face pressed against his shirt. 

"Tell her hi for me," Bucky said as he finally pulled away and threw the cape Steve had bought him over his time suit. 

"Will do." Steve laughed. "You look like an idiot in that."

"Punk."

"Jerk."

They hugged one last time, activated their respective Pym particles, and then Bucky was standing alone in a hallway. 

He grinned. 

This was it: the last step of his half of the mission. If he was being honest, Bucky had volunteered to return the stones specifically for this, for Asgard. Space had always fascinated him, and, from everything Thor and Bruce had told him (had had dragged out of them by a curious Buck) Asgard sounded like it had been beautiful. 

From his vantage point in this sunny archway, it was everything everyone had said it would be. No one was coming, so he allowed himself the luxury of leaning over the balustrade and taking in everything he could. The hills, the waterfalls coming out of the middle of buildings, the rainbow bridge leading to the Bifrost, the boats in the harbor. The literal edge of the world at a spot too near to be the horizon. Even this enormous hallways was interesting, lined with statues of helmeted, bearded heroes in various attitudes of non-human badassery. 

He was still gawking when he heard someone coming. Two women carrying a fancy-looking but drab-colored robe. Bucky receded farther into the shadows and pulled his cloak even more tightly around him.

"Which room is she in?" one of the women asked. 

"It's just down here," said the other.

"She is pretty enough," the first one said, "but I don't understand what Prince Thor sees in her. She's so… ordinary. Insignificant." A sniff. "Tiny."

"Well, she'll be dead soon enough, and it won't matter. Either, the sickness will take her in a few days, or she'll be gone in a scant few years, like all other mortals," the other said. "Then he'll take Lady Sif, or someone similarly suitable."

Bucky flexed his fist in anger. He'd never met Jane Foster—that's who they had to be talking about—but he didn't like the idea of talking about _anybody_ from Earth that way. Like they didn't matter. Like they didn't deserve anything good. Fuck that, Bucky thought. It was Jane who'd dumped their precious prince (as Bucky knew all too well from the same drinking sessions that had supplied the Asgard descriptions). Not because of anything wrong with the guy. But because he had always been off-world, and never took her with him. And, okay, yes, also because knowing he'd still look the same as ever even when she got old didn't sit well. 

The two women turned a corner, but Bucky was tracking how many steps they'd taken before knocking on a door, making fakely nice chitchat about bringing Jane her Asgardian duds, and then continuing on their way. 

At least now he knew where he was supposed to go. The only problem was that it seemed he'd come too late; Jane Foster was supposed to be napping, but he'd heard the women talking to someone her. He'd wasted too much time in that hallway, checking out Asgard instead of hurrying to find her before she woke up. And now the mission was compromised. (Not that it had ever been particularly well-planned, by Bucky's standards.)

The kinds of maneuvers that worked for a two-foot tall raccoon would not work for someone of Bucky's size, especially when the target—he didn't like calling her that, but lacked a better term—was awake to see him. Not to mention that Bucky, being not only a gentleman, but also a _decent fucking human being_ had more than a few qualms about reinjecting some poor, unsuspecting woman with a substance that a few minutes ago had been killing her. 

He'd been looking forward to Asgard, but not to this part. Something about the way everyone had talked about this portion of the time heist had sat poorly with him. The way they all talked around this Jane Foster, as though she were nothing more than a vessel for the Reality Stone, no more important than the rigging in which SHIELD had kept the Tesseract during the 70s.

Bucky knew a thing or two about being a witless vessel.

He took a deep, calming breath, just as his Wakandan therapist always told him to, and made himself go on. 

Bucky took the same number of steps that the women had and let himself into the door in front of him.

"Did you forget some…" a sleepy-sounding woman began to say, and then stopped once she saw that Bucky was someone new. "Oh! Hi." 

Bucky had been appropriately briefed for all this, had seen pictures of Jane Foster and read her bio, but nothing prepared him for seeing her in the flesh. He'd seen a lot of pretty girls in his time—had taken out a fair number, too—but this one took the cake. And from the momentary reaction he caught before she blushed and looked away, maybe he didn't look quite as stupid in this cape as Steve had thought. 

"I've been sent by the healers to check on you. Can I come in?" he said, trying to wing it, because he hadn't been meant to speak to her at all. 

"Oh, sure." She let him step through the door. "Though, I've gotta say, I feel a lot better all of a sudden. I think."

"You only think?"

She glanced between Bucky's face and the window, as though unsure whether to trust a stranger, but also too distracted by the beauty of the cityscape below to really think about it.

Bucky could understand; he kept looking at it, too.

"It's nothing. I just had a really weird, really real-feeling dream, that's all. I'm still shaking it off."

"What kind of dream?"

"A raccoon running out of my room. A raccoon with a gun. Crazy, right?"

Bucky's time as the Winter Soldier had left him with a superhuman ability to keep a straight face. "Mmm," he replied. 

"So?" she asked, putting her hands on her hips. "What tests do you need to run?"

"Er." Bucky moved closer and reached out to put his hand on her forehead, but snatched it back. He'd killed people, for decades, but this, lying to her and touching her for a lie, felt wrong, although in a different way. 

At the same time, he could sense the Aether in his pocket, pulsing against his leg even through its casing. A creepy goo looking for its host. Looking for _this_ host, this smart, beautiful, fascinating woman who deserved better than to be treated as a witless vessel in everyone else's plans. 

She was more than just a host, dammit. She was the woman who, in a few days, would help save all of reality (or something; Bucky had never been quite clear on that part). 

"I can't do this," he blurted out. 

"What?"

"I'm not who I said I was. I'm not from the healers."

She backed up, suddenly frightened. "Then who are you? Where's Thor?"

"I'm not here to hurt you," he said, but that, too, was a lie. "I mean, not like that." From the way she backed up against the wall, he realized that that sounded even worse.

God, hadn't he once upon a time been smooth? Bucky scratched the back of his head and tried to think of a better way to start this all over again. 

Thankfully, she took the reins for him. 

She'd been watching him struggle, and now pointed at him with a cute 'eureka' expression on her face that endeared her to Bucky even more. "You're from Earth! You are, aren't you?"

"Guilty. How'd you guess?"

" You're not like everyone else here. The way you talk. You're awkward and nervous. No one here is awkward and it's been driving me crazy. And you actually _look_ at me. You have since the minute you walked in here. Everyone else here—except Thor and his mom—looks right through me, or over me, like I'm some sort of bug. But not you."

"It's no problem. You're… You're great. Not a bug." Smooth, Barnes, smooth, he said to himself. 

"How did you get here?" she asked, and then sat up straight, excited. "The Convergence, of course. You must have just walked right through."

"No, that's not it." Bucky was certain that if Bruce or Tony or any of the others were here, they'd scream at him, but he was following his gut on this, and his gut had only rarely led him wrong. "Look, can you keep a secret?" he asked, uselessly, because if he'd gotten this far, then she'd _have_ to be able to keep a secret. Otherwise he and everything else were fucked.

"Ye-es? What's going on?"

"You should sit down for this," he said, and took his own advice at the same time.

She sat on the edge of a fountain that was in the middle of the room for some reason, even though this wasn't even that big of a room, and who puts giant fountains in the middle of their bedrooms? Asgardians, apparently.

"Well?" she asked impatiently.

"I don't know where to start."

"The beginning, obviously."

Bucky laughed. "Yeah, that's kind of the problem." He decided to just come out with it and see what happened. This was a girl who'd been immediately on board with the idea of a hobo in the desert being a fallen alien, after all. "I'm from the future."

"That's impossible." But because she was Jane Foster, she had actual, lucid reasons for disbelieving him. "It's been positively disproven to work. The physics just—"

"We figured it out. Trust me."

"How? How does it work?"

Bucky parroted back a couple of things he'd overheard from Bruce and Tony, without telling her exactly from whom he'd overheard them. It barely made sense to him, but whatever he was saying much have been enough to create a breakthrough in a brain as high-functioning as hers, because she started nodding. And kept right on nodding until she'd filled in blanks, and started murmuring other words and phrases that Bucky had heard, too, but would never have been able to dredge up on his own.

"Something like that," he said eventually. 

Jane started pacing the room, her previous fear of him completely forgotten as she lost herself in this new brain teaser. "The third dimension of the Einstein-Rosen Bridge. It's so obvious. I can't believe I…"

"Well, Einstein, and also Rosen, whoever he was, missed it, too. So, you shouldn't feel bad." Bucky smiled. He could have watched her make mental connections all day. Her eyes lit up and her toes tapped. 

"Are you a scientist, too?" she asked, leaning forward with more interest than she'd shown in him so far; interest he didn't deserve. "Did you help create it?"

"No, I'm just…" Bucky wasn't sure how to answer, these days: soldier; assassin Brooklyn boy; goat famer; hundred year old, semi-stable man. He settled on, "I'm Bucky."

That got a soft smile out of her. "And I'm Jane. But I think you already knew that. Nice to meet you."

"You, too."

"Why did you come here? Why today? " Then she looked down at her arm to where her veins should have been pulsing red, and deflated a little. "The Aether. Right. You're here about the Aether, aren't you? Not because you need _me_."

She looked sad, and it broke Bucky's heart to have to agree. He hated that in a minute he'd have to weaken her again, put that hateful stuff back in someone so obviously full of life. "Yeah. I'm so sorry. We needed it. From today specifically. You didn't dream the raccoon. He was here to borrow it. That's why you feel better. And I'm here to bring it back so that—"

"So that you don't create a branch universe. I get it. I'm not stupid." She slumped, depressed. "This morning, I heard them saying I was dying and they had no idea how to get it out of me. And now you're here to reinfect me."

"I know. And I'm sorry."

"Is it true?" she whispered. "Am I going to die? No, what am I doing. You can't tell me that, can you?"

Bucky shook his head. "All I can tell you is that if we hadn't borrowed this today, you would have died anyway. _Everyone_ would have died."

"Malekith," she whispered. 

"Sure," Bucky said, just to be safe. Let her think this was all about Malekith. 

She twiddled her thumbs and then looked up. "Wait. You're saying there's really a raccoon with a gun?"

"A talking space raccoon," Bucky said with a grin. He could tell when someone was trying to deflect, and when to let them. "His best friend's a tree. Nobody gets it, but we roll with it."

"Can you tell me about him? Is that part safe?"

"Yeah, that part's safe." Bucky wasn't actually sure, but he wanted to give her something, anything to perk her back up. So he told her a streamlined version of what he'd heard from the Guardians. Regurgitated the brief descriptions he'd memorized from Rocket's stories of Knowhere and Xandar. Told her about the twenty minutes he'd spent walking around a spaceship (Carol Danvers's spaceship, but he redacted the name, just in case). Told her everything he could remember about how the proton thrusters worked. 

The more he talked, the more she pepped up again, mind whirring behind bright eyes. The more he talked, the more he pepped up, too, and began to feel better about having said goodbye to Steve, about how visiting New York had officially made him realize how little he felt at home anywhere on Earth these days. He felt more at home here, in this place that would blow up in a few years, and with Jane, who was someone else's girl, than he had anywhere since WWII. 

Just his luck.

And Jane quivered with exactly the same kind of overwhelming excitement he felt, with the same frustration that she wasn't seeing enough, would never see enough, from this tower prison they called a palace. Bucky had been briefed enough to know that she'd get to see very little more of Asgard than he would. Tomorrow, Thor would hatch his plan and they'd head to Svartalfheim for the final showdown. Bucky hated knowing that this would be all she'd ever get of Asgard. 

"Hey," she said after awhile. "Are we friends? In the future, I mean. It feels like we're friends."

He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't help asking, "Do you want to be?"

With complete seriousness, nothing underlying the words, she answered, "Sure. It'll be nice to have someone to talk to about all this. Someone who gets it."

It was the best answer he could have hoped for, so he took it. Bucky hadn't forgotten that she was with Thor. Had just spent two years pining for a space god who had just taken her to his space palace. Bucky had no chance here, and wouldn't have wanted to get in the way even if he had. So, he shut down his feelings (too late), and decided to get back to business before this hurt even more. "Look, I should probably get going. I've already been here too long. You weren't even supposed to see me. We've never met, and we weren't supposed to now."

"Right. Got it," she said, clamming up, too. 

Bucky fell a little bit more guiltily infatuated with her as he watched her nervously limber up, as though getting pumped full of Infinity Stone were some kind of workout. He hated his. He hated himself. 

"How do you want me?" She blushed. "I mean, what do I need to do?"

"I'm supposed to hold it against your skin and deactivate the protective casing. It should seep back into you, just like the first time."

"Can I do it?" she asked. "I'd prefer it that way. Rather than you doing it, or it just taking me like the last time."

She wanted some control. Bucky could understand that. "Yeah. That would be better."

He handed her the red jewel. She turned it over and over in her tiny palm, growing paler the more she contemplated what she was about to do. Looking up at him, she said, "Whatever happens, I'm glad we met. And thank you. For not sneaking in and out, and doing it without telling me."

"You're one of the bravest people I've ever met. And let's say I know a lot of really brave people." He held up the casing remote. "Ready?"

She nodded. Bucky pressed the button, and watched her immediately go into shock. The thing wrapped around her, hot and red and pulsing and horrible. She gasped and writhed, and there was nothing he could do to help her, not without potentially infecting himself and screwing things up even more than they were already screwed. He sat there and watched, like the world's biggest and worst chump, as she eventually collapsed, unconscious, at his feet. 

Bucky picked her up and laid her gently on the bed, just as Rocket had said he'd found her. She felt hot but not clammy, not like a fever. He took one last look at her, at how the Aether had already begun to weaken her again. 

He hated leaving her here, but he tried to tell himself that it would be all right. 

"It will be all right," a voice behind him said, except higher pitched than the voice saying the same words in his head. Bucky spun around, shocked, because no one got the drop on him. _No one._

The woman quietly shut the door behind her. "My son said someone would be back immediately to return it. You're a little late."

This was Thor's mom, Bucky realized. If he wasn't supposed to meet Jane, he _definitely_ wasn't supposed to get caught by Frigga. Although it seemed that Thor had, too? Funny how he and Rocket hadn't mentioned that detail. 

"I'm sorry, ma'am. I got a little distracted."

"I can see that."

They both looked down at Jane on the bed. 

"Will be she okay?" he asked. 

"Everything will continue as you have heard that it will. Your mission has been a success."

"I don't know. I might have messed it up. I might not have been supposed to tell her."

"That will be all right, too."

"How do you know?" Bucky whispered, almost angrily, because how could she? Frigga was supposed to die today. How could _she_ know what would be all right or not all right ten years later?

"I am the goddess of destiny. It is my job to know. Which means that you can tell Thor, now that it is all over, to keep hope. His brother was right. The sun _will_ shine on them again. And you, Bucky Barnes, will be happy again one day. You will see the stars again. Both of you."

Bucky didn't think either point especially likely, but he wasn't about to argue with a goddess, much less one whose hours were numbered. 

"I'll tell him."

"You should go. Malekith will be here in a few minutes. I need to wake her and take her to where she will be safe."

Thor had drunkenly told Bucky this story on the two occasions they'd ever hung out, so he knew what Frigga was talking about. She was even braver than Jane. 

"You sure you don't want me to stay? I can be pretty useful in a fight. I can—"

"Your heart has always been in the right place. But no thank you. It's all right. We all have our time. I want you to enjoy all that is left of yours. Now, go."

Bucky took one last look out Jane's window, and left.

* * *

Bucky was lurking at the edges of the giant party Pepper had organized as a kind of after-funeral party. Tony himself had apparently requested it, specifying tequila brands and piñatas shaped like villains they'd fought (as well as a few assholes he'd simply disliked). If he was going to die, he'd said in his video message, he wanted his funeral to feel like an over the top birthday party he'd been too drunk to show up to. 

Bucky felt lonely, surrounded by people who claimed him as an ally, but who didn't know him at all. Even Steve—in what had only been an hour for Bucky—had lived a rich, full life that Bucky would never be able to catch up to. (And given that he'd somehow managed to follow Steve into super-soldierness and a seventy-year time skip into the future, that was saying something.)

He had no idea what to do next. He knew Wakanda would always welcome him back, but his kids—both kinds—had all grown up without him, moved on during the five year blip. Shuri would have too much on her hands right now to pay him the kind of attention she once had. Everyone said he was welcome to stay at Avengers headquarters, especially now that Ross and the rest of the world had pardoned him, likely because they didn't have time to deal with it all. But Bucky belonged here as little as he did anywhere else. 

Then he saw a small figure hovering near the edge of the party. Long brown hair and a curiously intelligent face, looking beautiful in a long blue ballgown. Her eyes lit up when she spotted him, but Erik Selvig got to her before Bucky could make his excuses to Wanda, who'd been wallflowering with him. 

He watched as Jane and Selvig hugged, and as they made their way over to where Thor and Valkyrie sat drinking heavily. Thor had spent the entire party so far clutching the Loki-shaped piñata and leaking tears into the papier-mâché horned helmet. He looked happy to see Jane, but not enough to put down the piñata. 

Bucky heaved a sigh of relief. He hadn't had a chance to talk to Thor since getting back—not that he'd have known what to say, or even what he wanted to know—but it did seem that whatever had been between them had faded to the most amicable of friendship. 

Jane left Selvig talking to Valkyrie and went over to say hello to Fury (thus proving her courage beyond any lingering doubt). She cast an uncertain glance at Bucky on the way.

He understood. She wasn't sure if it was safe, if it was time. She was waiting for him to confirm. This had to be his move. 

Bucky ran his fingers through his hair, an old vain instinct from before the war that he hadn't felt since he'd come back to himself. 

Luckily for him, Fury didn't do small talk. Jane barely got past opening pleasantries before Bucky could see him excusing himself to take a call (Bucky and Scott both thought he was faking these calls; they were always too well-timed to be believed). 

"Nice to see you again," he said, coming up behind her. 

"Finally!" she exclaimed, and then threw her arms around him so that Bucky practically melted. She stepped back, too soon for Bucky's liking, and said, almost accusingly, "Do you have any idea how hard it's been keeping this secret for so long? Ten years! Technically five, but you know what I mean."

"Not really," he said with as big a grin as hers. "It's only been a few hours for me."

"But it _has_ happened for you, which is all that matters. And everything's okay."

"Everything's okay. Did you know I'd be here tonight?"

Jane nodded. "I figured out who you were, maybe a year later. Thor was telling me about how Captain Rogers was looking for his friend Bucky. So I looked you up to see if it was the same Bucky, and you _were_. And then they were saying you blew up the U.N., but I knew you wouldn't do something like that. Not you."

"I've done plenty else. And anyway, you couldn't know that. You didn't know me."

"Sure I did."

Bucky gulped down an over-bubbling of emotion. "Hey, do you want to dance?"

"I'm not much of a dancer," she said, almost automatically, but her face said something else. 

"For what it's worth, this'll be my first dance since 1943. We can be rusty together. Hell, you probably know these new-fangled tunes better than I do."

She laughed and put her hand in his. "You sound like my grandfather."

"Not really what I'm going for."

He led her to the dance floor where little Morgan was cutting a rug with Happy and Peter Parker, and where Maria Hill was leading Sam instead of the other way around.

"Don't step on her feet," Bucky teased as he and put his arm around Jane's waist.

"Mind you don't trample her," Sam teased back.

From the other side of the room, Bucky could see Thor watching them. He raised his glass at him in cheers, and clutched the piñata even closer. 

The music changed to a slow dance, which Bucky felt more comfortable with than fast-paced pop.

"I figured it out, by the way," Jane whispered. "Just before the blip."

"Figured what out? Time travel?"

"No, not that. I've never cared about making a time machine. But what you told me that day got me thinking about new possibilities for finishing my Einstein-Rosen bridge. I did some tests. It seems to work."

"You actually remade the Bifrost? That's incredible."

"I haven't told anyone yet, just in case it wasn't time. I was thinking I'd wait until I saw you again. You didn't look much older than how you did in those pictures from Vienna, so I figured it would be soon."

"What's it got to do with me?"

"I wondered if you wanted to come with."

"Where?" Bucky asked, hoping she meant what he thought she meant. 

"Anywhere we want. Maybe Knowhere first?"

"You want me to go to space with you?" 

She looked down at where she was stepping on his feet. "I'm not that tough and space could be dangerous."

"I make an excellent bodyguard," Bucky said. 

Jane laced her fingers through his metal ones, and then traced up the lines of his plating. "Mmmm, yeah. That's, um." She cleared her throat. "That's kinda what I was thinking." 

Bucky had a feeling she was thinking about something else entirely. The same thing he was thinking. He whirled her outwards, like he'd used to do in the dancehalls in Brooklyn. She gasped and then laughed. When he reeled her back in, he said, "I want to go to space with you."

"How about now? All the stuff's in my car. Supplies, too. I come prepared."

Bucky looked around at the party. "Now's good."


End file.
